…Not In The Wider Interests Of Football Writing…

Kingstonian Preview

Well I’m glad we are playing the K’s at this particular moment in time, as it allows me to blow off some steam over their treatment by the FA this summer. For those of you who don’t know what happened, well here is probably the best place to start and finish catching up. Whatever your feelings are as to what Boreham Woods punishment should have been, I really think the FA have shown K’s a huge lack of respect by waiting so long to reveal their verdict…

I mean, most K’s fans probably knew in their hearts that it was going to get brushed under the carpet, but having to wait the entire summer for a response? I mean, did they leave it in an inbox somewhere then get the work experience kid to deal with it when they realised someone was going to want an answer at some point?

Of course, I grew up around Kingston and lived their most of my life. A pre-season audit of my old football programmes revealed I attended over 150 K’s games in my youth so will always have a massive amount of sympathy for them… although the number of K’s games I have attended post-2002 didn’t take much counting to be honest. I’m sure other Dons fans who weren’t fortunate enough to travel to away games with friends/family on a regular basis as a youth will have adopted their local non-league sides for Saturday recreation when the team were playing at the other side of the country. And I’m sure they will view this game as I would a meaningless kickaround with Tooting, for example…

Mind you, that doesn’t mean this fixture fills me with excitement… it just means I’m bothering to turn up tomorrow. I’m sure there isn’t a supporter of either side who are really going to be there for the standard of opposition alone… K’s are really just brightly coloured fodder for our ever improving Dons, and I would imagine most K’s fans would have seen our result against Woking on Saturday and thought they could do a job of improving on that…

Anyway, tomorrow night is ‘Pay for Christian Jolley Night’, in other words the game has been arranged to allow the Dons to pay for Jolleys transfer fee. Apparently if there is a surplus in receipts, K’s will get a share, which makes one wonder exactly how they feel about effectively helping another club pay for one of their young players. At this point I would post a link to the relevant post on their forum showing exactly what they think of it… or I would if that wasn’t just lazy blogging… oh, and they haven’t actually mentioned it over there (I did say excitement levels were at an all time low…).

Jolley has been one of the bonuses of pre-season so far, a summer that has turned doubting supporters into believers once more… which isn’t necessarily a good thing. Injuries are mounting up. Nwokeji, Blackman and Luke Moore are all at various stages of recovery at the moment, along with Steven Gregory who is due for a scan shortly… and we all know what sort of unanticipated damage those things can dredge up. And Southport is just around the corner now, literally, only two weeks on Saturday… which reminds me I should really have sorted my travel plans by now (uh-oh… looks like the coach for me…).